MUSIC

The Manic Street Preachers have still got it, it seems. Stephen Dalton talks to the Welsh agit-rockers about new album ‘Postcards from a Young Man’.

Prickly, polemical, poetic provocateurs in love with lofty ideals and lost causes, the Manic Street Preachers are one of Britrock’s longest-running soap operas. After 20 years of triumph and tragedy, the Welsh trio sound resurgent and hungry for hits again on their tenth album ‘Postcards from a Young Man’. Making its chart debut at number three last month, it is their most confident album for years, and has already earned some of the best reviews of their career.

With typically romantic melodrama, the Manics are billing this album as “one last shot at mass communication”. A lavish, impassioned, huge-sounding record, ‘Postcards…’ features gospel choirs and orchestral strings, recalling the rousing populist clamour of their 1996 best-seller ‘Everything Must Go’.

The mood is quietly upbeat when Venue meets the Manics at their Cardiff headquarters, Faster Studios. Once notorious for eviscerating rival bands in interviews, they are now far more domesticated and diplomatic – in public, at least. After all, singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield, bass-playing lyricist Nicky Wire (aka Nick Jones) and drummer Sean Moore are now fortysomething family men who write songs for Shirley Bassey and duet with Tom Jones.

All the same, Wire brushes off any suggestion of midlife complacency, insisting these perennial champions of lost causes have not become a lost cause themselves. He quotes ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas, with its very Manics message: stay passionate, stay angry, to your final breath.

“The Dylan Thomas thing has really grabbed me,” Wire nods. “It’s something I loved when I was 18 so it almost feels shameless now, but in a way we’re raging against the dying of the light. It feels like that every time we make a record. We still stand for emotion, passion, belief, hatred, love, cynicism...”

As ever with the Manics, political ideas are central to the new album. Proudly working-class intellectuals from the South Wales valleys, the band have long touted their old-school socialist principles. In general elections, Bradfield proudly makes a point of voting for “the party that’s going to tax me the most”.

Wire, meanwhile, scorns Nick Clegg as “the David Brent of fucking politics”, and even has a novel suggestion for the Queen. “I think the royal family should be nationalised, then they could have massive cutbacks. I used to want to abolish them, but now I like the idea of putting them through all the pain that everyone else has to go through.”

The Manics have survived some serious knocks during their two-decade career, notably the loss of their severely depressed guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards in 1995. After 13 years of ominous silence and speculation, Edwards was finally "presumed" dead in 2008. The band paid tribute with last year’s darkly abrasive album, ‘Journal for Plague Lovers’, which featured the last of their late friend’s lyrics.

“When you talk about Richey as a friend, someone’s son, someone’s brother, all those human things are really depressing,” says Wire. “But in a kind of mythical way, he was just a brilliant rock ’n’ roll star. My only regret is the platform he could have had, from us being so big, would have just been amazing. Every time we go on stage there’s no sense of closure, there’s just a big hole there.”

‘Postcards from a Young Man’ almost feels like the warm-blooded, uplifting counter-reaction to ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’. Like all the best Manics albums, it somehow manages to make songs about alienation and loss feel like heroic communal celebrations. Lost causes becomes singalong stadium anthems.

“We just wanted to try and transfer the enthusiasm and love we still feel for that silly thing called being in a rock ’n’ roll band,” Wire nods. “We still believe in the power of it because it changed our lives. Not many bands, apart from the Beatles, still have a chance of relevance and selling records on their tenth album. Most bands have become a museum by then. We still want it, and we’re not ashamed to say that.”

THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS PLAYED THE COLSTON HALL, BRISTOL ON MON 25 OCT.

Copyright Stephen Dalton 2010

Tweet